I'm Bruce Fummey, and if you can see it through the Scottish weather, then this is a memorial
to US war dead, but it's not in the US, it's not in Normandy in France. Now the troops remembered, were
from World War One, and yet it's not anywhere on the European mainland, it's on a Hebridean island.
Now in the last week, I've received two emails from self-confessed Americans, and they upset
me. One opened with I'm an American, don't hate me. The other, I'm an American, please don't dislike me.
Now that wasn't just upsetting, it was also unexpected I'll be honest, for a number of reasons,
but above all, that they might think that I would hate them because of their nationality, whatever
that nationality might be, and that on a personal basis, that they should fret about being American.
It just doesn't chime with our history, and don't get me wrong, everyone has national stereotypes.
Like they say Scots are haggis eating, kilt wearing, whisky drinking, golf playing cheapskates,
where as in truth, I've very seldom played golf! The Americans are shallow, loud, brash and overconfident,
and yet these two folks seem the very opposite. The thing is that here in the UK, that caricature
of Americans, was probably ingrained during their presence here in two world wars, where we fought on
the same side. In fact, barring their mischievous, downright rebellious exploits in the 1770s,
and a bit of fisty cuffs in 1812, we've generally got along fine, and as soon as they start
importing haggis again, normal diplomatic relations can be resumed. What I'm getting to, is that this
monument on a windy outcrop of a Hebridean island, tells of a night where our history was shared.
So if you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history,
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right, and let me tell you a wet and windy story.
On January the 1st, 1918, with the arrival of several hundred men from the northwest and the
Great Lakes region, the US Sixth Battalion arrived at full capacity. Three weeks later they had their
orders. At half past nine at night, with fully laden backpacks, the Sixth Battalion marched five and
a half miles, through the snow. At midnight they boarded a train for New York, and 12 hours later,
as the winter sun reached its zenith, they boarded the SS Tuscania, along with 20th Engineers, 107th
Engineer Train, Military Police and Supply Chain, 32nd Division and 100th and 103rd Aero Squadron.
Now if I've got that list incomplete or inaccurate, then let me apologise. The truth is, that when
they boarded, they were sons, brothers, fathers and individuals with real lives just like you and me.
Now the SS Tuscania, had been a luxury liner in a subsidiary of the Cunard Line, refitted and
pressed into service as a troop ship, and named after Tuscania, Italy. Now I'm sure some of these
US troops would have seen themselves as Italian. Now if the comments section in these videos are
anything to go by, some would have identified as Scots, and on the 24th of January, 1918, Tuscania
sailed out of port with 384 crew members and 2013 United States army personnel. She steamed for 12
uneventful days, across the Atlantic towards a foreign continent, that may have been ancestral
homelands. On the 4th of February, they were joined by an escort of British destroyers, to provide
a protective ring about them. They were entering the danger zone. To reach Liverpool, they had to enter
the bottleneck, out there between Islay here, and Ireland. Now on a better day than this, you can see
all the way across the North Channel, through which they had to pass. The steel in this part of the
Atlantic was much more densely concentrated. Troop ships like Tuscania, destroyers like HMS Mosquito,
and U-boats, like U-77, who was the cat and who was the mouse, would vary from time to time.
On the morning the 5th of February, day 13, she turned south for the North Channel.
It's at times like this, that your sense of hearing is that little bit more
acute. Laughter is just that little bit more forced, and faith in God, well that probably increases too.
Dusk was falling. Korvettenkapitän, Wilhelm Meyer in U-77, had been stalking the Tuscania for some time,
and at 6.30 in the evening, he ordered two torpedoes to be fired; the first one
missed, but the second struck a direct hit. The men on the Tuscania felt a huge bang. Now they
probably even heard it above the crash. There was no doubting what it was, and each man according to
training would head to muster points. When they got there, some would find that their allotted lifeboat
had crashed into the sea, as the deadly sea crashed into the gaping hole in the starboard midships.
Some men lost their footing as the boat swayed, some grabbed desperately, and caught a handful of
temporary safety, others weren't so lucky. Many will have followed the drill and already donned their
life jackets. Of course life jackets don't really guarantee safety, they just buy time, and in the
freezing Atlantic waters of February, imagine what it'd be like. Time is a scarce commodity.
Some of the convoy ships pressed on to protect the lives of the other troops in the group,
but the Royal Navy destroyer Mosquito came alongside, desperately trying to collect survivors
on lifeboats, and transferring others from the sinking hulk. Other destroyers like the Pigeon
and the Grasshopper followed suit. The waters were treacherous, the sinking ship was dangerous, and the
threat of U-boats remained. Captains would have tried to get close, but have to adjust, be twisted
and turned between Islay and Rathin Island, where Robert the Bruce is reputed to have met a spider,
who urged him, that if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, and the Captains did try again.
They showed incredible seamanship, just getting close enough to transfer survivors, as the ship
went down. Dealing with the risks of further torpedoes, and trying to reply with depth charges.
I've read that even fishing boats went into the blackness of the Atlantic night,
to try and rescue who they could, and here on the shore, the islanders prepared to tend the injured,
and bury the dead. 230 lives were lost that night. Of course this was 1918, and many islanders
would be Gaelic speakers, welcoming and tending to folks from another continent, that spoke
another tongue, burying bodies of men whose ancestors may have hailed from these very shores.
Most were exhumed when the war was over, and taken for re-interment, either to an American
cemetery in England, or to be repatriated to the United States, but not all, and in 1920 the
American Red Cross erected this monument here in their memory, but this isn't the only memory.
Now if you come to Islay, then the little museum in Port Charlotte is definitely worth a visit.
Here there are memories stored in various objects like horcruxes store souls in Harry
Potter. This is the Tuscania flag. For days after the sinking, corpses had been washed up in the shore.
After painstaking attempts by the local policeman to record details of the bodies for identification,
the time came for internment, but the day before the mass funeral, Mary Armour, the housekeeper
at a local grand house, realised that the US troops had no American flag to see them off,
and so she scaled up a picture that she found in an encyclopaedia, and along with
Jessie McLellan, Mary Cunningham and Catherine McGregor, she sat up till two in the morning
sewing this flag, to ensure that these men went to rest under their own colours. The flag
bearer was Michigan-born Private Arthur Siplon of the 100th Aero Squadron,
and later, salvage found the bell of the Tuscania, and they tell me that the Tuscania was the first time
a US troop ship was ever sunk. It's incredible to think that this bell, in the modest museum on
a Hebridean island, represents such a key part of US history, but there's another bell here as well.
You see just eight months after SS Tuscania went down off the south coast, HMS Otranto,
also carrying US troops from New York to Glasgow, was passing through that same coast
and in stormy winds, it was accidentally rammed by HMS Cashmere, a friendly ship of the same convoy.
The people of Islay found themselves, once more, the nurses, undertakers, providers and
consolers for a large number of American troops. 600 soldiers and crew were rescued,
but hundreds weren't so lucky. It was thrown on to the reef and smashed to pieces. Almost 500 people
died in the disaster, and Islay people dealt with the grim task of recovering, and burying the bodies.
700 men, mostly American troops, but also British crews, lost their lives in those two disasters
off the coast here. In this cemetery, 71 out of 74 graves are for men of the Otranto, who didn't make
it. 43 of the bodies were never identified. Here on this Hebridean island, lies our shared history.
If you want to know more about shared Scottish and American history, then a video
about one of the Scottish founding fathers of America is coming up on screen now.
In the meantime tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.